“Data is pouring into this place, the Hub, from capitals and military bases across the planet,” Miss Wells said proudly. “In October 1962 we have recruits, like Mort, embedded in every major nation’s capital.”
“You have been busy,” Bernadette sneered.
Laura wasn’t all that impressed. “If you’re from 2007, why do your computers look like they’re from 1962?”
Miss Wells sighed. “Because they are from 1962. Look, time travel is very energy-hungry. In fact we’ve only got one shot at this; if we fail to change things as we wish, we won’t be able to try again—well, we can’t fail, that’s all.
“And we haven’t been able to carry much with us, into the past. Small things, like the mobile phone you swiped from my locker at school.
“Otherwise we’ve had to work with what’s here. Most of what you see around you is from 1962. And you can’t make a 2007 computer from 1962 components. Why, you still use valves! I know you have transistors, but you’ve never heard of a chip, a microprocessor, have you? There are whole industries that haven’t been invented yet.”
Bernadette walked up to the pool. It glowed with pulsing blue light. “I should have brought my water wings.”
“I wouldn’t go dipping in here,” Miss Wells said. “That’s our power source. A small fission reactor.”
“Nuclear,” Laura said.
“Yes. The water is for cooling, and for protection from the radiation. That blue glow is Cerenkov radiation. Electrons from the pile.”
“What do you need a nuclear reactor for?”
“To heat up all the valves in these ridiculous Bakelite computers. To run the Burrower. And to keep open the Time Portal.”
This was the odd doorframe that stood in the middle of the room, filled with a sheet of misty light.
“I suppose it looks like an airport metal detector,” Miss Wells said. “Ah, but you don’t have those yet, do you? It’s actually a wormhole mouth. But you don’t know about spacetime wormholes either. It’s a tunnel that connects two points.”
“Like the Mersey Tunnel,” Bernadette said.
“Yes. But this tunnel connects two points in time, not in space. You can walk through that doorway and pass straight from 1962 to 2007, without having to live through all the boring years in between.”
Laura asked Agatha, “Is that how you got here? A Time Portal?”
Agatha shrugged. “Our technology’s more basic. My time machine’s a bit like a car.”
Miss Wells looked down her nose. “Your timeline does sound a bit scruffy, I must say.”
“We lived through a global nuclear war,” Agatha said.
“Which is exactly what the Hegemony avoids.”
Laura said, “I think you’d better tell us what you’re doing here in 1962.”
“I’m here to save mankind from itself,” Miss Wells said. She smiled.
Chapter 25
The nuclear pool cast blue light on the faces of the big computer boxes. Laura saw that the pool’s water bubbled quietly, slowly boiling, and there was an acrid stink of acid.
“I don’t even know what ‘Hegemony’ means,” Laura said.
“The word means a power complex,” Miss Wells said.
“Why does that surprise me?” Bernadette asked.
In Miss Wells’s timeline, even though some atomic bombs had fallen, Kennedy and Khrushchev pulled back from the brink. The United Nations called a truce, hasty peace negotiations began, and each country, America and Russia, sent aid to the other.
But in the deep shadows behind the public actions, some big players weren’t happy.
Miss Wells said, “They call it the ‘military-industrial complex.’ The generals in the big military power centres, like Whitehall in Britain, the Pentagon. The industrialists who grew rich selling bombs and planes and tanks to both sides. The scientists who came up with new types of weapon.
“Even before 1962 they all knew each other, across the world. A five-star general in Washington understood a field marshal of the Soviet Union far better than he understood President Kennedy.”
The military-industrial complex was horrified by the fitful Phoney War of Sunday 28th October. If you had a peace it had to be secure, so you could make money out of selling weapons. If you went to war you had to push it to a conclusion, to win, so you could make money out of rebuilding the loser and rearming the winner. This wishy-washy excuse for a war was no use at all.
“But of course you wouldn’t want total annihilation either,” Miss Wells said. “Like the Sunday War. That went too far. The purpose of war is the resolution of conflict. If everybody ends up dead, what’s the point? You can see that the whole global situation needed managing competently.”
“I can see you need your bumps felt,” Bernadette said.
The big, secretive players began to talk to each other, American to Russian, British to Chinese, in the lull on Sunday 28th.
“In those first few hours,” Miss Wells said, “the Hegemony was born.”
If the politicians were too stupid to run things, the military and industrialists would do it for them. The Hegemony, led by soldiers and businessmen from across the world, became a secret government that ran the planet. But it was all behind the scenes.
“Nobody wanted to alarm the public,” Miss Wells said. “Or to have anyone bleating about democracy or human rights. The work was too important for that.
“And I was in it from the start,” she told Laura. “You were. After Dad was arrested, I was put in a sort of military college. The Hegemony knew it would need bright young people to run things in the future, and I was one of them.”
All Laura could think about was Dad. Arrested? Why?
“So I was there, Laura. I was there in 1964 when the new Labour government was brought down. Anthony Wedgwood Benn? Too socialist by half.
“I was there in 1969, aged twenty-one, working on the American technical team that landed men on the Moon. We started testing nuclear weapons up there on the Moon in 1970.
“I was there in 1973 to help President Nixon hush up the Watergate scandal.
“I was there to help Thatcher and Reagan get elected in 1979 and 1980. Our sort of people, they were.
“I was there in 1989, when the New French Revolution, two hundred years after the first, put our lot in control in France. They were always an awkward bunch, the French. Not any more.
“And I was there in 1990 to help throw Nelson Mandela back into jail, and prop up apartheid South Africa.”
“Joel was right to leg it, then,” Bernadette whispered.
“I’ve been there all my life. Working to make sure the Hegemony’s grip is absolute. You could say I grew up with it. I was involved in the Fire Power movement in 1967, and the Live Hate concert at Wembley in 1985…”
“And thanks to you,” Bernadette said, “the Cold War just goes on and on and on.”
“Yes. All over the world, in Berlin and Cuba, across the North Pole and in the depths of the Pacific, American and Russian forces face each other, bristling with nukes. We’re in a state of unending war.
“But nobody gets hurt. That’s the point. Peace has reigned since 1962. And it always will. Peace Through War!”
“The real point of your Hegemony,” Bernadette said, “is that you get to boss everybody about.”
“You rule them by fear,” Laura said. “Fear that more bombs will drop.”
“But it’s for their own good,” said Miss Wells.
“The lady’s right.” There was a whir.
The Minuteman was approaching in his motorised chair, with Mort at his side. Now they were side by side their similarity was obvious. Mort and the Minuteman, like Laura and Miss Wells: two editions of the same person, plucked from different times. The Minuteman’s chest was half-covered by a big band of campaign ribbons and medals, and his epaulettes had tassles.
“The Minuteman,” said Miss Wells reverently, “is on the Hegemony’s Inner Council.”
Bernadette scoff
ed. “He looks like a cinema usher. Hey, mate. Got any choc ices?”
Laura giggled.
“Silence,” Mort barked.
Mum seemed on the verge of tears. “Mort. You betrayed us. How could you?”
“Veronica. Babe. It’s not like that. It’s a question of higher loyalties. I was recruited by my own older self. Who comes from a future where he—I—have been working for the elimination of war for forty years. How could I refuse a commission like that?”
Laura said, “You lied to us. You hid equipment in our house. You came sniffing around my school, trying to get at my Key. How noble was that?”
“What do you know?” Mort sneered. “In the future, I’ll be a hero.”
The Minuteman barked, “This is the nature of peace and war, when atomic devastation is hanging over all our heads by a thread. In an age like this, you need soldiers in charge. Because only soldiers understand war. That is the principle of the Hegemony and always will be.”
“So,” Bernadette asked insolently, “what happened to you? Fall out of a bomb bay?”
“I’ll have you know I gave up my health in the Phoney War. I was stationed on a B-52 that flew out of Mildenhall Air Base. Came down over Soviet territory. Never walked again. Did my job, though. Did my duty. And that’s the point. And this man here,” he said, glancing at Mort, “is going to face the call in a couple of hours’ time. If it comes he will do his duty just as I did. Won’t you, Mort?”
Bernadette said, disbelieving, “So you’ll fly your plane even though you know you’ll be crippled?”
“Yes, ma’am! This man is my future,” Mort said, and he put a hand on the Minuteman’s shoulder. “I can think of no higher calling than to become him.”
“Heck, boy, don’t make me cry,” groused the old man. “The tears short out the chair.”
Bernadette said, “So everybody thinks they’re at war. Even though American and Russian soldiers haven’t fired a shot in anger for forty years. Doesn’t anybody ever rumble you?”
“Of course,” Miss Wells said. “Every ten years or so you have a new crop of teenagers who can’t see anything to be afraid of. Who get suspicious. Who want to be free, to live their own lives.”
“And you can’t have that,” Laura whispered.
“Every ten years or so, they have to be reminded.”
“By what?”
“A bomb in the heart of Russia. A missile hitting America. Rogue strikes by either side. The devastation, the fear, the suspicion, the paranoia—that’s what prods the public back into their sheep pens.”
Laura said, “People die, because of what you do.”
“Isn’t it better that a few thousand are sacrificed in a burning tower block, than that the whole world burns up in nuclear fire?” She glared at Laura. “You’re judging me, aren’t you? Mort admires his future self. Why can’t you be like that? I’ve worked for peace for forty years. You don’t know how hard it’s been. Living in steel caves in the ground, the endless competition, knowing that if you make one slip you’ll be chucked out to live among the drones on the surface. It made me hard. It will make you hard. Will it really be so bad, for you to be me?”
Laura looked at her wrinkled face, pale from a lifetime underground. Her hair grey as a gun, pulled back severely from her forehead. Her eyes, so like Laura’s own, but wet, rheumy, old. Laura pitied her.
She asked, “What happens to Dad?”
“Dad?”
“In your timeline. You said he was arrested.”
“He was a refusenik,” the Minuteman snapped.
“A what?”
Miss Wells sighed. “In the lull, after the nuclear strikes while the negotiations went on, your dad and other officers waited in their airbases and missile silos. There was a mistake. An order to launch the V-bombers came. Dad didn’t believe it. He prevented a squadron from taking off.”
“How?”
Miss Wells smiled. “He always was handy with his fists.”
“He was tried,” the Minuteman barked. “By a Hegemony court. Found guilty of not following orders in a time of war.”
“But the order was a mistake!”
“What’s that got to do with it?” the Minuteman said. “He was shot. Along with all the other refuseniks.”
Laura’s heart broke a little bit. “Isn’t there a higher duty? To common sense? To the ordinary people who would have got blown up for nothing?”
“Oh, no,” Miss Wells said. “Orders are orders, and that’s all there is to it.”
Laura looked at Miss Wells, at her own face. No matter what kind of life she had to lead, could she ever care so little about what became of Dad?
She recognised something of herself in Miss Wells. Laura was bright, she knew that. She was strong too, dogged. She could survive in the Hegemony’s world if she had to. But Miss Wells had no compassion. A frozen heart. Miss Wells, this grown-up copy of her, after a lifetime of bad choices, was like a projection of bits of Laura, but not all of her.
Miss Wells was Laura. But she was less than Laura. This was like a nightmare of growing up.
Mum gripped her hand hard. “Never forget who you are,” she whispered.
“I won’t,” Laura said.
Bernadette said to Miss Wells, “So what do you want in 1962? Why are you chasing after Laura’s Key? Your Hegemony already owns the world, according to you. You own the whole future.”
“But the future is not enough,” Miss Wells said. “We want the past too… Come. Let me show you.”
Chapter 26
Laura and her companions huddled together in the middle of the huge main chamber.
Banks of screens, like tellies fixed to the walls, started to light up around the room. The images were military, of bomber bases and missile silos, bunkers and war rooms and citadels.
And a vast map of the world lit up on the floor, under their feet, the capital cities glowing green.
There was a whir and a squeal. The Minuteman came rolling across the world map towards them, with Mort striding at his side.
“Watch out,” Bernadette called. “You’re leaving skid marks on China.”
“Shut her up,” the Minuteman said.
Mort bunched his fist and marched towards Bernadette.
Mum stepped before him. “She’s a child. She’s pregnant. You’ll have to get through me first, Mort.”
Mort glared, but backed off.
He marched around, pointing at screens. “I’m not the only recruit. These are military centres around the world. Holy Loch in Scotland. The US Air Force command centre in Montana. Canada. Australia. India. China. Africa. All the major countries of western Europe, including West Germany. And the east—Poland. Hungary. Czechoslovakia. More than thirty bases inside the Soviet Union itself.
“These are all men and women of 1962, like me. All soldiers. All of us willing to do whatever it takes to bring about the shining future of peace and order the Minuteman has described for us.”
“All traitors to the countries you swore to serve,” Laura said.
Mort flinched at that.
Bernadette said, “In 2007 you already run the world. What more do you want?”
“But our hold is fragile,” Miss Wells said. “Here’s Agatha, interfering with this turning point in history—with the founding of the Hegemony itself. We must eliminate the chance of that happening again; we must guard against an invasion from some other future.”
Laura said, “I don’t understand. How can you control the past?”
Mort said, “By conquering it. By taking over 1962, as the Hegemony has taken over 2007.” He waved a hand at the banks of screens. “Here is the plan. As soon as I have your Key, Laura, I’ll be taking up that Vulcan nuclear bomber. And I’ll be flying it—”
“Where?”
“London.” He pointed at the floor map.
The green spot that was London turned black.
“You can’t be serious.”
The Minuteman said, “The news will f
lash around the planet. There’ll be panic, riots, the usual civilian guff. But it won’t matter a red cent.” He chuckled, a noise like an echo in a graveyard.
“The destruction of London will be like a beacon, lit on a hill,” Mort said. “A signal to all those like me, waiting in the bunkers and citadels around the planet. And they will act.”
All over the map of the world, the lights of more capitals flickered out, one by one, green to black. Paris. Rome. Pretoria. Canberra. Washington. Moscow.
“They’ll turn on their own cities,” Bernadette said, horrified.
“Think of it,” the Minuteman whispered. “The civilian leadership of the whole planet, amputated. Sloughed off, as a snake sheds its skin. And the Hegemony will rise up. A new world order established at a stroke.”
Laura was horrified. “You’re talking about destroying major cities with nuclear weapons. Millions will die.”
“Millions more will live in peace,” Miss Wells said.
“The peace of sheep in their fields,” Laura said. “Of cattle in their pens. With no choice, no freedom, no hope.”
The Minuteman started rolling backwards and forwards across the map of the world. When he spoke his spittle flecked the floor. “We don’t have to stop here,” he ranted. “In 1962. Once we’ve established our control of this era, we can go further back. 1940, for instance.”
“Yes,” Miss Wells said. “We could deal with Hitler before he has a chance to wreck Europe.”
“Oh, no,” the Minuteman said. “Recruit him! Those Nazis were a bunch of thugs, but there’s a lot about them to admire. Order. Efficiency. Control.
“And further back still.” He grinned at Mort. “Our surname is Mortinelli. We’ve been Romans from way back. Shall we go back to the Caesars? A Roman Empire with nuclear weapons! Do you think we have the blood of emperors in our veins, boy?”
Even Mort looked a bit uneasy now.
“We have the technology to make it happen. We have the vision. We have the will! We have—ulp.” There was a pop, and a smell of burning insulation, and the wheelchair came to a dead stop in the middle of the Atlantic. The Minuteman rocked his head back and forth, frustrated. “Oh, to heck with this thing. Get me off of here, boy!”
THE H-BOMB GIRL Page 19